Bloggers Buzz

Akismet has announced that their anti spam platform is now available for the Lifetype blogging platform.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, anti spam, akismet,

Matt at WordPress has issued a warning to splogs (spam blogs) created during SEO contests:

A few times a year someone decides to hold a search engine optimization contest to see who can get top rankings for various search terms on Google. As the number #1 hit for “Matt” on Google, I can totally understand the fun of this sort of endeavour.

However many times the contestants in these contests use less than kosher means of winning, such as spamming or creating dozens or hundreds of blogs all linking to the same website. (Sometimes called splogs, or spam blogs.) These blogs use up quite a few system resources, junk up the tags system, and can slow the site down for normal folks.
There are many blogs being created here by people wanting to use our blogs to try to win this contest. But WordPress.com is about blogging. It’s about communication, thoughts, news, and many other things in life. It is not about SEO.

These blogs are not welcome and will be removed when found.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, spam blogs, wordpress, anti+spam,

Blogger has added a New Old Feature to Beta, Edit HTML view:

Blogger in beta initially launched without a few features — it’s still a beta version after all — and it turned out that one of the ones folks missed the most was having an Edit HTML view for their templates in the new Layouts system. I can sympathize with that myself. Complete template control was one of the things that originally made me choose Blogger over the other available options almost four years ago (and yes, that was before I worked here). That kind of personalization and customization is important to us here at Blogger, so I hope no one thought this feature was gone for good.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, blogger, blog design, blog template,

Akismet experienced some downtime yesterday:

The stats code introduced yesterday had a bug which only triggered about 24 hours after it had launched. It kicked in for different blogs at different times, but the result was that starting sometime last night you probably started to see really obvious spam getting past your Akismet filters.

All of our systems were up and running at the time, and spam was being correctly identified, which is why our monitoring systems didn’t notify us of the problem. However, there was extra junk being included with the response which broke the API call, which expects only “true” or “false”.

I’m really sorry about this, when things are working smoothly it’s easy to forget how much vile junk is actually being blocked day to day. I’m going to go through my blogs now and double-check that no spam actually got published, and I’d suggest other folks do the same. The “mass edit” mode under “Comments” should be useful for WordPress users.

I’ve also taken steps to make sure on the Akismet side this kind of error can’t happen again.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, comment spam,blog spam, WordPress, anti spam,

Akismet is at present seeking feedback whether users want Better Stats?

We did some upgrades to the system last night to do some more finely grained tracking of the per blog and per key amounts of spam, ham, and mistakes moving through the system. It’s starting to expose some interesting data, and it’s kinda fun to play with. I’m curious if folks would be interested in getting access to the data for their key, daily stats and such? No graphs yet, but that’s a logical next step.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, comment spam,

News from the team at Akismet that Akismet now supports PunBB:

PunBB is cool forum software, which is now even cooler that it has spam protection.

Per Soderlind has written an Akismet spam protection mod for PunBB. Per said:

Thank you for making Akismet, I finally got rid of spam from my forum.

I’ve added it to our development page, which now features 24 different application and language implementations of Akismet.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, akismet,PunBB, spam, anti-spam

Bad Behavior 2.0.6 is now available to test. Its incorporates new spam blocking methods to catch previously uncaught spam but is still under evaluation to ensure no false positives. At present the code is available to anyone who has contributed financially at least $5 to Bad Behavor development or contributes now.

Tags: blogging, blogs, blogging news, spam,blog spam, comment spam, anti spam, plugins,

Lorelle has posted on Content Specific Comment Spam on the Loose and details the scourge that comment spam is becoming as the spammers improve their techniques:

This weekend, I found several comments I believed to be legitimate on a couple of my blogs. The wording was specifically targeted and related towards the content. I even responded to two, thinking they were legit. They were not.

You need to know that while WordPress, various WordPress Plugin authors, and many blog comment spam fighting tools are working overtime to fight off comment spam from your blogs, the comment spammers are working equally, if not more, to overcome comment spam filters and checkers and testers.

These new comment spammers look for related keywords and post a vague but specific comment related to the keywords. A careful check of the URL/address of the website shows that it links to a splog or commercial website. So the URL is the only clue that this comment is comment spam.

I’ve had the same experiences on this and other blogs myself, only the url has been the dead giveaway but i expect in time as spammers refine this new technique it will get increasingly difficult to seperate the good comments from the bad. And thats all bad news in my opinion because the comments you receive can be some of the most rewarding part of blogging.

Tags: blogging, blogs, spam, comment spam, comments,